The Creative Mind

“Sometimes, we place too rigid or high expectations on ourselves. For instance, some creative professionals have this idea that success means creativity would come easy for them, when in reality, creativity is an ebb and flow process.” - Creativity coach Lisa Riley

In her book The Gifted Adult, Mary-Elaine Jacobsen writes “This ebb and flow is the reality of the creative life and that we must expect and accept.”

But for many creative and gifted people, it may be a real challenge to allow the natural ebb and flow of the creative process.

Janet Echelman changed from painting to sculpting due to circumstances; it can be very productive for artists to embrace this kind of fluidity.

“My first semester at college, I took a drawing class where we had to report on the life’s work of different artists. I picked the painter Henri Matisse, who in old age became bedridden and then invented a whole new way of image-making (the cut-paper murals). I wanted to have a life like his, where I’d be learning at every stage without fragmentation between my inner life and my working life.

“My whole career I’ve been interested by the distinction between an emotional and an intellectual response to an artwork..."

INOCENTE, an intensely personal coming-of-age documentary about a vibrant Latina teenage artist from a dauntingly tough background in San Diego who refuses to allow her struggles with poverty and homelessness to get in the way of her extraordinary talent, will premiere on MTV on August 17, 2012.
The film chronicles Inocente, an irresistibly likeable young woman who has overcome poverty and homelessness and won widespread recognition for her whimsical, colorful artworks. Color, as she likes to say, is her revolution.

TED Talks Janet Echelman found her true voice as an artist when her paints went missing -- which forced her to look to an unorthodox new art material. Now she makes billowing, flowing, building-sized sculpture with a surprisingly geeky edge.

"History’s varying definitions of genius all make it sound pretty darn exclusive. If this is to be believed, only 0.1 percent of us are eligible to enjoy the benefits of genius, which means the rest of us miss out. I don’t think so!

"Many of us do not live up to our potential simply because of insufficient motivation or belief in our own powers. Others fail due to adults’ inattention to our potential in childhood. Think about how your life would have changed if as a child your natural genius had been acknowledged and nurtured and been the core of your personal development."

Psychologist Cheryl Arutt says "Many creative people carry the belief that their pain is the locus of their creativity, and worry that they will lose their creativity if they work through their inner conflicts or let go of suffering…"

Musician Sting commented: “Do I have to be in pain to write? I thought so, as most of my contemporaries did; you had to be the struggling artist, the tortured, painful, poetic wreck. I tried that for a while, and to a certain extent that was successful. I was ‘The King of Pain’ after all. I only know that people who are getting into this archetype of the tortured poet end up really torturing themselves to death."

- From above article, and the "Intensity" section of my book Developing Multiple Talents: The personal side of creative expression
http://t.co/KqYN0ORZ

"Paul Scheele, CEO of Scheele Learning Systems, shares an overview of his new book, Drop Into Genius. He explains how people lose their access to the rich inner resources within their mind. You will hear how facing your fears, dealing with challenges, and even experiencing tumultuous change allows you to discover more of your potential and reclaim your brilliance."

Get the ebook Drop Into Genius

http://talentdevelop.com/DIG

"Growing up in general is difficult for everyone. Ordinarily during the stage of your life when you're going through your adolescence and you're completely awkward and uncomfortable, the rest of the world isn't watching you with bated breath. It's different when you're an actor and you choose to work your way through that period because it only makes it worse. Taking 5 years off was the best decision I've made so far, for myself and for my career." (imdb)

~~

See many more posts on my site The Inner Actor

http://theinneractor.com/

By Shelley Hitz

It might not be as much work as you think.

In fact, if you already own a website or blog, you can seamlessly transform your most popular content into a book.

Think about it: you can take the same great content you’ve already written for your site and reformulate it into a printed book, PDF eBook or audio book to make the most of all your hard work.

"Creating art has always been a way to channel emotional intensity." Psychologist Cheryl Arutt //

"Our impulse to be creative can be one of the most dynamic methods of meeting and redeeming one's devils and demons." Psychologist Stephen A. Diamond.

From post: Creating is a way to channel our emotional intensity

http://talentdevelop.com/6047/

New edition of my [free] Developing Creativity newsletter.

Gifted adults: Brilliant innovation and extraordinary contributions

Tony Wagner on Encouraging New Innovators

Creative Thinking and Being Introverted or Highly Sensitive

...and more

A number of writers and researchers associate the personality traits of high sensitivity and introversion with creativity and creative thinking.

One of the personality types identified by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is “ISFP” – which refers to people who lean toward Introversion, Sensing, Feeling and Perceiving. Some well-known people that researchers consider being this personality type include a number of artists such as Fred Astaire, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Streisand, Paul McCartney, Auguste Rodin, and Mozart.

J.R.R. Tolkien spoke of myths and fairy stories, rather than "fantasy." He believed that mythology was a means of conveying certain transcendent truths which are almost inexpressible within the factual confines of a "realistic" novel.

"Fantasy is not just whimsical ego-nonsense but comes really from the depths; it constellates symbolic situations which give life a deeper meaning and a deeper realization." Marie-Louise von Franz in her book The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. http://vsb.li/tVKBNE

"Such attending to the psycho-logic of myth and the mytho-logic of the psyche's processes might be described as an exploration in mythopoeisis, in soul making, for it gives us some sense of how the soul, our soul, is given its shape through poetry, through images. Christine Downing, The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine http://vsb.li/1rVl5f

How can parents, educators and business leaders support people to become more creative, innovative and entrepreneurial?

“Innovation-minded parents encouraged their children’s play, passion and purpose.”

Tony Wagner is currently the first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and the founder and former co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The quote above is paraphrased from his article My View: Creating innovators...

"I think the difficulty with me is that I am interested in so many different things I can never really imagine myself doing one thing, I want to be a renaissance woman." - Emma Watson, shared to my Developing Multiple Talents Facebook page.

Creative thinking involves dual and often opposing qualities such as convergence & divergence, control & abandon, order & disorder, certainty & uncertainty.

Robert Bilder, PhD engages in research at The Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity, and says "Creativity is at the edge of chaos."

A video with Malcolm Gladwell says "Embracing intellectual messiness goes against our instincts and training as educated people, but writers and artists should accept and understand it as crucial to the creative process."